This invention relates generally to the field of telephony, and more particularly to an intelligent cordless telephone interface device.
The telephone can be and often is very disruptive to ones life. The dilemma is voice communication remains the single most important form of communication to most people and as a result we are naturally inclined to want to answer the phone when it rings even though it can be very disruptive at times. Many people are taking crude steps today at managing this disruption. There are those who use today's answering machines as call screeners by listening to the message as it is being left and then picking up the phone if it is someone they wish to talk to. Others try to control the disruption by implementing rules like "no-one answers the phone during dinner".
There are plug-in cards and add on devices on the market today that allow a PC Application to read caller-ID information off a phone line. However, all of these solutions require the user to be in front of the PC to benefit from the caller-ID information. The reality of the home environment is that people do not spend all of their time in front of their PC. This is true even for an individual who's business is based in the home.
Cordless phones have greatly increased accessibility within the home or office environment. The ability to answer the phone from anywhere in and around the house has made cordless phones very successful products. With the increased accessibility provided by this technology comes the realization that `increased access` means increased access from both desirable and undesirable sources. A deficiency of existing `cordless communications` solutions is that incoming call management is very limited. For the majority of cordless phones in use today, the user has no way of knowing who the calling party is and therefore has no way of deciding how to handle the call.
Cordless phones are known that display calling line ID, but choices for handling the call are limited to answer or don't answer (in which case an answering machine could be used to answer the call).
An object of the invention is to overcome these deficiencies of the prior art.